APEX 5 - New features that may or may not be included

Development Team Status Report from David Peake during OGh APEX World

UPDATE:  Screenshots of the new APEX 5 Page Builder Interface

Yesterday (April 9th, 2013) David Peake opened the Dutch OGh APEX World conference with a keynote presentation. As expected, he talked about the future release of Oracle Application Express, version 5. Another very interesting part of David’s presentation focused on the architectural aspects of APEX running on the upcoming 12 c release of the database. Here’s my summary. But before you start basing any business critical decisions on this blog post, I have to mention that

• everything I’m writing in this article, may or may not be included in future releases of Oracle products
• is my personnel view or opinion and that I’m not related in any kind to Oracle Corporation
• …

The APEX development team is currently in the process of investigating functionality and possible solutions to include into APEX 5, and it seems that some of the features David was talking about were more idea’s and general directions. There was no live demo, understandably, just a few screenshots and a very interesting mock-up of the builder interface.

APEX on Oracle DB 12c

APEX version 4.2 will be preinstalled in the 12c root database. All pluggable databases (PDB) of this root instance will be running the same APEX version, but are isolated instances. The first thing after installing a 12c DB, probably, is upgrading the APEX to the latest release, currently 4.2.1 (there will be a 4.2.2, David told us). Upgrading APEX in 12c, when installed in the root database will be very easy, as all PDB’s get upgraded at the same time. For upgrading an 11g APEX installation to 12c, there will be scripts provided to convert the it into a root installation.
If you want to run different version of APEX in different PDB’s on the same 12c root instance: you can. Oracle will provide scripts to remove the root installation of APEX, so you can install independent repositories and versions of APEX in each PDB. It is more administration, but as a developer, I’m glad to get this possibility.
There are some new 12c DB features, that will be supported by APEX 4.2.something:

• VARCHAR2 32k support. As HTML text fields didn’t care much about field length anyway, this is manly an enhancement on collections.
• Identity Columns. This means, you won’t need to specify a sequence or function to populate a PK, because this will happen automagically.
• Invisible Columns: will not be displayed by default.No values will be inserted when basing forms on this type of columns. You can manually add code to your page to show the value of an invisible column.
• Data Redaction. This is a feature that does not need much of a change in APEX itself, as data is masked in the database, depending on policies. But there will be a change in the SQL workshop to support administration of these policies.

APEX 5

We all know the Oracle Application Express Statement of Direction, so I don’t have to list features already mentioned there. David pointed out, that the development of APEX 5 has to main focuses:

• Improve Developer Productivity
• Quality

Here what drew my attention during David’s APEX 5 possible feature presentation.

• we will be able to declarative define Modal Dialogs in APEX 5. We even can stack multiple modal dialogs.
• the APEX dev team is thinking of enhancing the Builder interface and the concept seems to be inspired by interfaces we know from SQL Developer, JDeveloper and other similar IDE’s.
  • a tree navigation on the left hand side to access page components
  • possibility to switch to a component view instead of tree view
  • a large layout editor (welcome back) in the middle of the page with predefined components to (drag & drop) place into your page layout
  • a property editor showing the properties for the selected page region/item.

Revamped APEX 5 Builder Interface; Artist Impression (i.e. mine)

• a new tabular form component based on jQGrid with inline editing ability:

jQGrid screenshot (not from actual APEX screen)

• PDF Printing, using APEX Listener 2.0’s FOP support. Integration will be more declarative, and the possibility to specify formatting options through templates, break control and master/detail layouts.
• further extension of WebService capabilities, like publishing and SOA integration. Allowing to connect with remote Oracle DB’s through WS, as an (better) alternative to database links.
• the rest pretty much was known from the SOD …

Wrapping it up

All together, I think version 5 will be a release to look forward to, from a developer perspective. It looks like, some of the current shortcomings, like master-detail-detail and multiple interactive reports on one page, will be tackled by the APEX development team. Especially the revamped builder interface is a very interesting idea, but, when keeping the current Tree View AND Component View, there will be a lot more pages/code to maintain by the dev team.
Oracle currently is working on enhancing version 4.2 (12c DB integration) as well as version 5. With 12c expected for somewhere in 2013, we can easily guess the priorities. APEX version 5 will not be as spectacular as 4.2 with respect to end-user functionality (jQM and RWD), but consolidate the development of the past years and enhance existing functionality (mobile: table support, IA Reports: multiple on one page, Master/Detail/Detail, …)